Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

• Monday’s Enquirer carries a sanitized obit for Larry Beaupre, the fine, aggressive Enquirer editor whose career was destroyed by a trusted reporter during the Chiquita scandal.

Larry’s
genius was motivating his staff to take chances and go the extra step.
No one wanted to admit not making the last phone call to check something
in a story. We made those calls.

As part of that, Larry brought the “woodshed” to the Enquirer
newsroom on Elm Street. It was the perfect walk to his corner office
overlooking the Ohio and Licking Rivers. There, Larry would privately
discuss some failing or pratfall in that morning’s paper.

My
favorite Larry story — there is no way I’ll call him Beaupre — is
Lucasville. I was involved in coverage of that prison riot and
occupation from its start on Easter, 1993. Larry was part of
Pulitzer-winning coverage of the bloody Attica prison revolt in New
York. He gave us everything we asked for at Lucasville. In the middle of
that deadly mess — 24/7 for 11 days in Scioto County red clay mud
outside the prison on what became press row — he drove down to deliver
Sunday papers and thank his bleary staff. That’s leadership.

“I
will never forget the Sunday morning when Beaupre showed up,”
then-reporter Howard Wilkinson recalled for an earlier column. “He asked
me what we needed. ‘Cash, and lots of it,’ I said, explaining that we
had to buy food and clothing for the crew, most of whom came unprepared
for 11 days in the mud. Larry pulled his wallet out of his back pocket
and start counting out a wad of $50s . . . gave me $500 on the spot,
which I ended up spending at Big Bear and the Subway in Lucasville.
‘There’s more where that came from,’ Beaupre said.”

Larry didn’t
meddle when things went right. There always were questions about why we
didn’t have some Lucasville story that someone else did. Larry always
accepted “we checked it out and it’s not true.” We got it right and he
honored that.

A year later, he made sure we knew that a
routine Lucasville anniversary story wasn’t acceptable. Kristen DelGuzzi
and I spent weeks on race, religion and crowding in prisons around the
country and Lucasville. The ordinary was not acceptable to Larry or his
editors.

Not long ago, I sent Howard Wilkinson’s comment to
Larry, along with that column anticipating the 20th anniversary of
Lucasville in 2013. Larry responded warmly, saying it’s nice to be
remembered for something beyond Chiquita.

However, it’s the
nature of our trade that we’re remembered for our biggest screwups. Ask
Dan Rather. So it is with Larry: the year-long investigative effort and
special 18-page section describing what reporters Mike Gallagher and Cam
McWhirter learned about Chiquita operations here and abroad. Typically,
Larry gave two trusted reporters all of the resources they needed. He
and Gallagher had worked together before Larry brought him to
Cincinnati. Gallagher’s decision to eavesdrop on Chiquita voice mails
doomed the project and cost Larry his career.

They gave us a
dark view of Chiquita operations, especially in Central America. The
project blew up in our faces and Larry was the scapegoat even though the
stories had gone all of the way up the corporate chain and back again.

Readers
noted that despite the three page 1 apologies and curious renunciation
of the stories that followed revelation of Gallagher’s dishonest
reporting methods, the Enquirer did not retract the facts.

Larry and the Enquirer
had challenged the most powerful man in Cincinnati, Carl Lindner.
Gallagher’s dishonesty gave Lindner his opening and Lindner crippled the
paper for years. As part of the deal with Lindner and Chiquita, the
paper paid $14 million.

More devastating was the condition that
Larry had to go. He did. McWhirter was moved to a top reporting job at
the Gannett paper in Detroit. David Wells was removed as local editor —
the one job he always wanted at the Enquirer - but stayed to become opinion page editor.

Gallagher
— who lied to everyone about how he got those voice mails and included
his lies in the published stories — was fired. He stayed around to plead
guilty to tapping Chiquita voice mail system and stayed out of prison
by naming his Chiquita-related sources.

The Enquirer
lost the passion and editing talents of Larry and David Wells and Cam
McWhirter’s reporting skills. Other colleagues began leaving; the Enquirer was tainted goods. Job applications from similarly talented journalists dried up, I’m told, for years. I’m not sure the Enquirer ever recovered.

•
Larry (above) and his family moved to Mt. Lookout from West Chester
when he came from New York. No matter what landscapers planted in his
garden overlooking Ault Park, deer ate them. Then there were the
raccoons. Larry came to my desk in distress, wondering what he could do.
I suggested a nonlethal Havahart trap. Let the critter loose in another
park. Larry tried it. Bait would be gone, the trapdoors closed and no
‘coon. One night he stayed up to see what was going on. The critter went
in, ate the bait, and when the doors dropped, other raccoons tipped
over the trap. Doors opened and “prisoner” walked free. I think he gave
up; Midwestern deer and raccoons were more than his New York smarts
could conquer.

• If you missed it, go back to last Tuesday’s Enquirer
opinion page and read mediator Bob Rack’s essay on civility in public
life. It’s broader than elections and is more practical than the typical
admonishment to behave.

• Thursday’s Enquirer
started a page 1 watch on the Pride of the Tristate, naysaying
obstructionists Mitch and John. I hope Enquirer reporters tell us what
Mitch and John and their House and Senate colleagues do in the name of
“bipartisanship.” Skip their words. Watch what they do.

•
“Gravitas” apparently is so 2010. The new word favored by many politics
writers is “meme.” A wise editor once told me to avoid foreign words
unless they’re so common that even an editor would know them. Meme —
from the Greek — fails.

• Quotationspage.com attributes this
famous aphorism to department store merchant John Wanamaker: “Half the
money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know
which half.” I wonder if that’s true about campaign ads. Billionaire
right-winger Sheldon Abelson helped poison the well but the New York Times
says only his candidates drank; they all lost. I haven’t seen a similar
analysis of libertarian Koch brothers spending but it reportedly was
far greater than even Abelson’s. Democrats countered by raising and
spending zillions. The only difference was the far greater number of
Democratic donors needed to reach the magic totals. Great for TV
stations but brain damaging for the rest of us.

• There
is no “financial cliff.” We’re not going to go over it on Jan. 1. An end
to Bush tax cuts won’t pitch us in a recession on Jan. 2.
Sequestration won’t suck zillions out of the economy in one day. Yes,
there is a downward economic slope if Congress and Obama don’t sort out
the tax/deficit mess. So, why do journalists continue to parrot
bipartisan “over the cliff” rhetoric when the facts they report make it
clear that no such precipice exists?

• My nomination for a “Useless” award is the New York Times telephone people who are supposed to help with home delivery problems. Twice last week, the Times
wasn’t there in the morning and replacement papers weren’t delivered
that day or the next. That included Wednesday’s paper with the election
results. More aggravating was the blue-wrapped Times on my neighbor’s drive, giving lie to the Times’ “problem resolution” staff’s explanation that there were problems at the printing plant. Times’ operators and clueless supervisors were in Iowa: dim bulbs who sounded like they read from an all-purposes script.

• I finally used the New York Times website to email their vp/circulation. A reply came quickly, promising to contact the Enquirer whose carriers deliver the Times. A prompt call from Enquirer
circulation on Elm Street promised replacement papers and a personal
delivery. Didn’t happen. Still hasn’t, a week later. A perfect union of
ignorance and interstate bullshit.

• Last week’s CityBeat
cover story was the annual Project Censored; the most underreported
major stories in the major news media. The list misses my No. 1 most
underreported story of the year: third-party candidates for the
presidency and their platforms.

About the only time the major
news media noted Third Party existence was to wonder if a third party
might get enough votes to deny victory to a Democrat or Republican in
any state(s). Affecting a state’s vote totals would be bad for
democracy, those news media anxieties imply.

So I’d offer two
suggestions to my 24/7 news media colleagues. First, voting one’s
principles is not bad for democracy and it has the potential for great
news stories. Second, third party platforms suggest ingredients in
whatever becomes conventional wisdom in 2016 or 2020.

That’s
what third parties do; hopeful but realistic, they do the thinking that
seems to escape mainstream Democrats and Republicans. If you doubt me,
look at what came out of the Progressive era 100 years ago and what
might come out of Tea Party initiative and energy.

• Are news
media short of photos of Petraeus in civvies? He’s no longer a general.
Most images I saw after his surprise resignation had him in uniform.
Also, the developing story of how his affair was discovered is
fascinating. The FBI stumbled on Petraeus when it was investigating a
complaint of online harassment against Paula Broadwell, the adoring
graduate student who became author of the new Petraeus biography and his
lover. The complaint came from another woman, a frightened friend of
the Petraeus family. Agents looking at Broadwell’s emails found
classified information and romantic emails between Petraeus and
Broadwell. Tacky as this is, it fell to Jay Leno to sum it up: Guys,
Leno said, if the head of the CIA can’t keep an affair secret, don’t
you try it because if you do, “You’re screwed.”

• BBC’s sex
scandal — knighted entertainer Jimmy Savile and others at BBC abused
hundreds of girls for years — continues to spread. So far, it hasn’t
touched the BBC World Service which Americans get on WVXU/WMUB and other
FM stations.

Last week, however, it cost BBC’s new top exec his
job. He quit after one of his reporters suggested during a TV interview
that he should “go” and a former Cabinet minister responsible for BBC
said Winnie the Pooh would have been a more effective curb on careless,
defamatory reporting.

The latest mess involves BBC’s top
domestic current affairs/investigative TV program, Newsnight and the
broader issue of child abuse by prominent and powerful figures in
British public life.

BBC’s Newsnight broadcast Steve Messham’s
claim that a top Conservative politician was among men who molested him
in a state children’s home during the 1980s. Newsnight didn’t name the
Tory but others did on social media: Lord Alistair McAlpine. He came
forward last week and denied wrongdoing.

When Messham saw a
photo of McAlpine after the broadcast, Messham recanted and apologized.
His abuser wasn’t McAlpine. No one showed Messham a photo of McAlpine
before broadcasting his accusation. BBC last week apologized
“unreservedly.” That phrase usually means a libel suit is anticipated.

Meanwhile,
BBC officials canceled Newsnight investigations. Newsnight already is
under investigation for killing an program that would have outed Savile
as a serial abuser. Savile is dead but three colleagues have been
arrested so far.

• Thedailybeast.com excerpts from Into the Fire,
a book by Dakota Meyer, the Kentuckian who won the Medal of Honor in
Afghanistan. It’s a toy chest of news tips for reporters. Here’s part of
the excerpt:

When I got home in December, I felt like I had
landed on the moon. Kentucky is pretty much what you think: cheerful
bluegrass music like Bill Monroe, rolling countryside, good moonshine,
great bourbon and pretty girls. Greenery, lakes, the creeks and rolling
hills, forests, birds, other critters and all the farms. There’s that
genuine friendliness that comes with small towns and close-knit
families. You don’t want to act like an asshole because it will get back
to your grandmother by supper.

“Something like: ‘Well, Dakota, I hear you had some words today with that neighbor of Ellen’s sister’s boy.’

“Dad,
of course, was happy to see me, as were my grandparents, so that was a
good feeling. Dad didn’t give me a hard time about Ganjigal, and neither
did my leatherneck Grandpa. We just didn’t talk much about it. It was
great seeing my family and friends, but they had their own lives.
Everyone around me was excited about football, Christmas, and other
normal things; I was looking at the clapboard houses and the cars and
thinking, man — so flimsy. They wouldn’t give cover worth shit in a
firefight.

“It was an exposed feeling. And where were my machine
guns? I found my old pistol and kept it around like a rabbit’s foot, but
I missed my 240s and my .50-cals something awful. It seems weird, I’m
sure, but I really just wasn’t buying it that there wasn’t some enemy
about to come over the green hills, and I felt so unprepared—I wouldn’t
be any good to protect anybody.

“I was set to soon go off to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, for PTSD therapy . . . “

•
Next year, we’ll commemorate the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. It
wasn’t the last time we underestimated the resilience of a far weaker
“enemy.” JFK reportedly told the Times that he would have aborted the invasion if the Times
had had the cajones to publish what it knew about preparations in
Florida and Central America. However, during the two weeks before the
invasion, the Times published stories about the preparations.

•
Next year, we’ll also commemorate JFK’s murder. I watched demonstrators
at our London Grosvenor Square Embassy vilify the U.S. for its role in
the Cuban missile crisis. The night of JFK’s death, crowds were back . .
. to sign a book of condolences.

• A federal judge ordered
the FBI to pay journalist Seth Rosenfeld $479,459 for court costs and
lawyers’ fees. He sued the FBI after it ignored his appropriate requests
under the Freedom of Information Act. Poynter.com says Rosenfeld will
donate the money to the First Amendment Project Project in Oakland,
Calif. It handled his case pro bono for 20 years. That’s chump change to
the bureau and it costs individual agents nothing for blowing him off.
Meanwhile, news organizations say broad resistance to FOIA requests has
worsened throughout the federal government under Obama.

• Newsweek
is going digital-only next year, in keeping with boss Tina Brown’s
changing reading habits. She says she doesn’t even look at newsstands
any longer; everything she wants is on her Kindle. Of course, she’ll
fire people. Newsweek always was No. 2 to Time
Magazine which continues its print edition. I’ve ignored giveaway
offers from both magazines for years. It isn’t print, it’s their
content. My choice? The Economist’s weekly U.S. print edition.

•
ABC said his family was unaware of film director Tony Scott’s brain
cancer when he jumped off a bridge in August and died. Now, ABC admits
its original unverified and uncorroborated story was wrong. There was no
brain cancer. It only took two months to admit and correct the error.

Apologizes for posting mock election results early at Cincinnati.com

The Cincinnati Enquirer earlier today posted fake data on its website showing Mitt Romney with a 92,000-vote lead in a supposed early vote count in Ohio. Editors later posted an apology, explaining that the election-results chart was created as a template and was inadvertently posted early.

The Enquirerexplained the error: “A Cincinnati.com front-page link to a chart with dummy data, created as a
design template for election results, was inadvertently posted early
Tuesday morning. It purported to show early voting totals in
Ohio counties. However, no votes have been counted yet — by law counting
doesn't start until the polls close. Cincinnati.com regrets the error.”

The correction came a bit
too late, however. Conservative-leaning Drudge Report had already
tweeted the false results before the apology was published, and journalism blogger Jim Romenesko called The Enquirer out on it.

Providing voting results before polls close is typically frowned upon in media circles to avoid discouraging voters with potentially disappointing numbers.

Media musings from Cincinnati and beyond

• After weeks of dreary campaign coverage and
soul-destroying political ads, here’s a day brightener. Jian Ghomeshi’s
long-format interview radio show, Q, scored a rare interview with J. K. Rowling. She was in New York promoting her first adult-audience book, The Casual Vacancy.

Among other things, Ghomeshi asked why she courts news media criticism
by giving so few interviews. “Well, I just don’t think I have that much
to say.” And why do the news media make so much of her reluctance?
“That’s because the media is very interested in the media,” she said.

I laughed so hard I had to sit down in our northern Ontario cabin. Q is a morning program and evening repeat on Canada’s CBC Radio. Q is heard here at 9 p.m. weekdays on WVXU.

• Further proof that life as we know it revolves around Cincinnati: the Oct. 29 New Yorker’s
essay on the fraud of voting fraud begins with Hamilton County. We’re
the perfect example of GOP supporters trying to intimidate voters. A key
point made by reporter Jane Mayer’s sources: photo IDs might deter
someone impersonating a genuine voter but you don’t corrupt an election
that way. You need massive — if subtle — manipulation of the vote count.

• So, is anyone confident your vote will be counted
accurately? We don’t get a receipt showing how our votes were tallied.
Any retailer can give us a receipt showing what we’ve paid by charge or
debit card. So where are the reporters asking Boards of Elections why it
can’t give us a receipt and editorials demanding this accountability?
Receipts won’t prevent corrupt officials, employees or hackers from
going into voting-counting computers after we vote, but it might deter
some.

• Hamilton County Board of Elections assures the Enquirer
that its voting machines are secure. No computer-based anything is
secure. Computers are more or less vulnerable to external hacking and
surreptitious insider reprogramming. Worrying about GOP ties to voting
machine companies doesn’t make me a conspiracy crank. It matters because
of Romney’s links to the current equipment provider. In 2004, the
then-provider of our voting machines was “committed to helping Ohio
deliver its electoral votes to the president (Bush) next year.” That was
Walden W. O'Dell’s promise. He was chief executive of Canton-based
Diebold Inc., which made voting machines Ohio used in 2004. W carried
Ohio that year.

• GOP efforts to restrict voting is second
only to the Republican commitment to ending a woman’s access to
abortion. It’s not new. In all of this year’s reporting about Republican
voter suppression — photo IDs, phony “official” mailings misdirecting
voters of color, etc. — didn’t find references to William Rehnquist
before he was Chief Justice of the U.S.

Google is rich with
Rehnquist’s dark history as a GOP operative. This came from a
files.nyu.edu post about John Dean’s book, The Rehnquist Choice.
The folks at New York University said “Dean was a member of Nixon's
cabinet, was Nixon's counsel in the Watergate affair and played a
prominent role in selecting Rehnquist as a Supreme Court nominee. He
writes that Rehnquist was part of roving ‘squads’ of Republican lawyers
who went from precinct to precinct, confronting and harassing black and
Latino voters.” Here’s what Dean wrote on pages 272-273 of The Rehnquist Choice:

“Collectively, these witnesses described 'squads,' or teams, that moved
quickly from precinct to precinct to disqualify voters, confronting
black and Hispanic voters standing in line at the polls by asking them
questions about their qualifications, or holding up a small card with a
passage from the U.S. Constitution and demanding that the voter read it
aloud; also photographing people standing in line to vote."

"All told, the Democrats produced fourteen people who swore they had
witnessed Rehnquist challenging voters. In rebuttal, the Republicans
produced eight witnesses who claimed they had not seen or heard of
Rehnquist challenging voters — but none of them could testify that they
were actually with Rehnquist during any entire election day, nor did
their testimony cover all the elections involved in the charges . . .
The evidence is clear and convincing that Rehnquist was not truthful
about his activities in challenging voters."

• Most Americans
tell pollsters they rely on TV for their news. Next Tuesday, these
viewers will take their rich opinions and impoverished facts into the
voting booth. This recalls Mr. Whig, the fictional alter ego of a great
Enquirer editorial page editor, Thom Gephardt, who frequently muttered,
“I fear for the Republic.”

• Much as I have followed
campaign coverage, I have little or no idea of what Obama and Romney
will do to create jobs, ease immigration problems, provide and pay
medical professionals to care for millions to be covered by Obamacare,
wean us from deadly coal, cope with problems associated with fracking
for oil and natural gas, make the wind blow and sun shine, reduce or
slow global warming, bring Palestinians and Israelis closer to a
peaceful two-state resolution, deal with the Taliban when it returns to
power, etc. Despite what I hear from any liberals/progressives, Obama
hasn’t disappointed me; I wrote nothing on that blank slate in 2008. It
sufficed that he wasn’t McCain. In his way, Romney increasingly recalls
Nixon in 1972 with his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war. He had no
plan. That was the secret. Deja vu all over again.

• Mark Curnutte’s Sunday Enquirer
post-mortem on the lethal street culture of revenge among some young
black Cincinnatians is as current as perps who became victims soon after
he interviewed them and Amanda Davidson took their photos.

•
CNN.com “unpublishes” reporter Elizabeth Landau’s story linking women’s
hormones to political choices. CNN says the story wasn’t edited
adequately. The study by a Texas academic concludes that ovulation makes
women feel sexier. Ovulating single women are likelier to vote for
Obama (liberal) and ovulating married women or women in other committed
relationships are likelier to vote for Romney (conservative.) I wonder
if CNN pulled the story because some subjects are beyond inquiry, like
women’s abilities for math and science or racial/ethnic differences in
various pursuits. Then there is the whole fantasy about “unpublishing”
an online post. You can get to the original story — replaced by an
editor’s note on CNN.com — at poynter.com or dailykos.com.

• The Seattle Times
seeks to restore readers’ trust after it published free ads for the
Republican candidate for governor and for supporters of a state gay
marriage referendum. The ads make the paper part of each group’s
propaganda machine. There is no other way to say it. Good luck to
reporters who have to cover those campaigns. Maybe someone should create
the “Almost Darwin Awards” for news media bent on self-destruction. You
don’t know Darwin Awards? Look it up. The awards are as funny as Seattle Times’ claims to virtue are cringe-worthy.

After the paper’s ethical pratfall and a newsroom rebellion, the Seattle Times
turned its fact-checkers loose on those free partisan ads and gave the
ads a rating of “half true.” (T)wo ads that were checked contained two
true claims, one mostly true, one half true and two that were false, the
paper and Poynter.com said.

• Newsroom rebellions rarely go public like that by Seattle Times journalists (above). Years ago, then-owners of the Minneapolis Tribune and Star
supported relocation of the Viking/Twins stadium from the ‘burbs to
downtown. Here’s what the New York Times said in its obit of the
publisher, John Cowles Jr.:

“Opponents, including staff members at The Minneapolis Tribune,
thought it was a clear conflict of interest for the owner of a
newspaper to take a public position on an important local issue it was
covering . . . (S)taff members placed an ad in their own paper
disassociating themselves from the company’s involvement.”

•
Fifty years ago, we almost had a nuclear war over missiles in Cuba and
en route on Soviet freighters. Regardless of where U.S. ships turned
back the freighters, it was the real thing, no Gulf of Tonkin or Weapons
of Mass Destruction fraud. I was at UPI in London and the Brits were
very, very frightened; in a nuclear war, both sides’ missiles could be
overhead and Soviets would attack Britain’s RAF and Royal Navy nuclear
strike forces. I went to the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The crowd
was hostile. Least threatening were those carrying or wearing what is
now known as the “peace symbol.” Then it was the much more potent and
timely totem of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

•
Half a century later, that British CND symbol is a meaningless design
for feathered earrings and leather-thong necklaces. But turn the symbol
upside down so that the “wings” tilt up. You have the Brits’ Vulcan
“V-bomber.” It was the heart of their Cold War airborne nuclear
deterrent during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vulcan bases would have
been targets in any nuclear exchange.

• Only a coverup is
juicier than the original scandal, especially in broadcasting. BBC is
tearing itself apart over the sex scandal. Arrests have begun: Convicted
pedophile and BBC TV entertainer Gary Glitter is the first. Hundreds
claim a leading children’s program presenter and colleagues molested
hundreds of girls at BBC studios, children's hospitals and other
locations. The focus of the probe, Jimmy Savile, is dead. His victims —
including women at BBC — offer explicit tales of his harassment and
abuse. BBC execs are accusing each other of lying or misleading
parliament; Scotland Yard is beginning to ask why police didn’t act
sooner on repeated reports and complaints about Savile and other abusers
at BBC.

• AP says New York Times
publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. last week reiterated his support for
the Times’ new CEO, Mark Thompson. Thompson, who was BBC’s director
general until last month, has been under scrutiny over the BBC’s
decision to cancel its major investigative program about Savile sexually
abusing youngsters. AP says Sulzberger told Times staff that he was
satisfied that Thompson had no role in canceling the explosive program.
As with all scandals and coverups, we will learn what BBC and Scotland
Yard knew and when they knew it. Lovely.

Media musings on Cincinnati and beyond

• Look at the rare collection of Enquirer photos at the National Underground Freedom Center. They’ve been reprinted and for many, reprinted copies of original pages are nearby.

The show is part of the much larger Fotofocus at many venues. Unfortunately, the Enquirer chose the Freedom Center which charges $12 admission; many Fotofocus displays are in admission-free venues such as the YWCA or UC’s Gallery on Sycamore.

I think the oldest photo is from 1948, a one-legged veteran leading a parade to commemorate the end of WWI 30 years earlier. Many are by photographers with whom I worked and whose images I displayed large on local pages during weekends when I edited. Some are recent, by photographers I admire but know only from their images in the paper.

To its credit, the Enquirer exhibit includes unpublished photos of which the photographers are justly proud. First among them is Gary Landers’ image of a homicide victim illuminated by an officer’s flashlight behind Landers’ home.

Missing are two images that remind me of what photojournalism is about. One is Gerry Wolters’ stunning — and in its time, controversial Pulitzer contender — of a dead African-American lying in a pool of his blood on the Avondale street where he’d been shot by a bailbondsman. Standing over him is the dead man’s young son. Some readers said our photo would ruin the child’s life. No, I told callers, if anything would it was his father’s killing.

The other missing photo was one that wasn’t published by the paper: Glenn Hartong’s firefighter carrying a toddler from a burning house. I’m told that editors flinched because they didn’t know if the child survived. So what? That faux humanity illustrates Enquirer execs’ fear of readers tossing their cookies into the Cheerios. Such touchy-feely screening sanitizes what can be a nasty, brutish and short life and lifestyle in our region. Life Magazine published Hartong’s photo across two pages and someone posted it in the Enquirer newsroom coffee alley. It doesn’t get better than that.

In the Good Old Days, before self-inflicted sensitivity, the Enquirer had a unapologetic double standard for violent images. If the victim were local, the photo might be spiked to avoid upsetting readers. An example was the half-excavated body of a recognizable young construction worker suffocated in a trench cave-in. Distant victims — executions, genocide or bodies in floods/earthquakes — were likelier to be displayed.

And even before the Good Old Days, Ed Reinke’s iconic photo of a line of shrouded bodies from the 1977 Beverly Hills supper club fire gave a sense of magnitude to the disaster that our best reporting couldn’t. It’s the first photo in the exhibit, preceded by a warning that some images could be troubling. They should be. I don’t know if Reinke’s photo would be used today.

• Ohio’s Sherrod Brown is among the Democratic senators targeted by out-of-state billionaire GOP donors. He’s an unapologetic liberal and the Progressive monthly made Brown’s re-election battle its latest cover story. A point I’d missed elsewhere is the unusual state FOP endorsement for a Democrat but Brown stood with officers against Republican legislation stripping them of most of their bargaining rights.

The Progressive story includes a Mason-area jeweler whose health insurer refused to pay for an advanced cancer treatment. Husband and wife say Reps. Jean Schmidt and John Boehner brushed off their pleas to intervene with the insurer. A Brown staffer — who said she didn’t care what party the Republican couple belongs to — spent the weekend successfully persuading the insurer to cover the potentially life-saving $100,000 procedure.

More recently, reporters on Diane Rehm’s public radio show estimated SuperPACs are spending $20 million to defeat Brown and suggested it might not suffice. As a DailyBeast.com columnist notes, polls show Republican Josh Mandel probably won’t even carry his home Jewish community in Cleveland.

• That same Progressive names 26 billionaires and their known donations to Republican and other rightwing causes in this election year. No Cincinnati-area men or women made the list but it’s reasonable to infer that some of the men listed donated secretly to Super PACs opposing Ohio’s Sherrod Brown’s re-election (see above).

• As one of that dying breed — an Enquirer subscriber who prefers print — my morning paper is missing a lot. Customer service provided a free online copy and promised to deliver the missing paper paper the next day. Next day? Another customer service rep said only replacement Sunday Enquirers are delivered the same day. Message? Don’t stiff advertisers.

• The ad on the top half of the back page of the Oct. 11 Enquirer Local section invited everyone to a Romney-Ryan “victory event” on Oct. 13 at Lebanon’s Golden Lamb. The bold, black ad headline on the bottom half of the page was “The #1 dishwasher is also a best value.”

• Want to know more about Sarah Jones, the former Ben-Gal and school teacher who admitted to sex with a 17-year-old student? Among others, London’s Daily Mail has enough to satisfy anyone who doesn’t need to see a sex tape.

• Don’t piss off Turks. That’s a lesson lots of people have learned to their pain over the generations. No one will be surprised if Turkish forces invade Syria to end Syrian shelling of Turkish civilians. Turkish troops have gone into Iraq to deal with threatening rebellious Turkish Kurds seeking sanctuary there. Turkey is a NATO member and NATO says it will defend Turkey if required. A couple English-language websites can complement the snippets about this aspect of Syria’s civil war: aljazeera.com from the Gulf and hurriyetdailynews.com from Turkey.

• The New York Times stepped back from the slippery slope of allowing subjects of news stories to say what news is fit to print. It allowed some sources to review and possibly change their quotes before reporters used them. In July, Times reporter Jeremy Peters blew the whistle on the Times and other major news media. The alternative to quote approval often was the threat of no interview. Initially, the Times defended the practice. No longer. Jimromenesko.com reported the change.

Times executive editor Jill Abramson told Romenesko that quote approval “puts so much control over the content of journalism in the wrong place . . . We need a tighter policy.”

Romenesko quoted a recent Times memorandum that said “demands for after-the-fact quote approval by sources and their press aides have gone too far . . . The practice risks giving readers a mistaken impression that we are ceding too much control over a story to our sources. In its most extreme form, it invites meddling by press aides and others that goes far beyond the traditional negotiations between reporter and source over the terms of an interview . . . So starting now, we want to draw a clear line on this. Citing Times policy, reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to the source or a press aide to review, approve or edit.”

Good. Here’s my question: What happens when a beat reporter can’t get an important interview after citing Times policy? Access is everything. Few people who want media attention will turn away the Times, but editors can get weird when reporters can’t get a desired interview.

• Daily papers own and are members of the Associated Press. In their rush to be first, AP reporters used social media to get out the news and scooped member papers whose editors hadn’t seen the stories yet. That went over badly in today’s breathlessly competitive world. AP promises it won’t use social media until after breaking news is sent to members and non-member subscribers. • It’s time for the news media to abandon “reverse discrimination” when the purported victim is white and English-speaking. It’s an issue again because the U.S. Supreme Court is reconsidering university racial admission criteria. A young woman claims the University of Texas rejected her because she is white.

Discrimination is discrimination; someone is favored and someone is rejected. I won’t anticipate the court’s decision but the ethical issue is whether the community’s or the individual’s compelling interests are paramount when discrimination becomes policy and practice. Moreover, demographic trends could make “reverse discrimination” obvious nonsense if Anglos become a minority among newly-hyphenated and darker-skinned Americans and immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia.

• We’ve seen three debates, two presidential, one veepish. The third was Tuesday or last night if you’re reading this on Wednesday. I missed it; I was fishing in Canada. Other journalists will tell you what you heard really means. I’ll catch up when I get home. At least the Biden-Ryan contest was lively and the moderator asked smart, sharp questions and kept the politicians under control.

• The vice president and challenger had disturbingly weird expressions when they listened. Biden’s smile recalled a colleague’s remark after waterskiing with me: “I saw Ben smile and he wasn’t baring his teeth.” Worse, Biden’s expression could appear to be a smirk. Ryan’s intensity reminded me of a predator wondering about its next meal. Neither appearance had anything to do with the substance of the debate but it’s how we tend to judge people we don’t know. My question: Is this really how we choose the man one heartbeat away from leadership of The Free World (whatever the hell that means)?

• Viewers — and these performances are TV events — worry me. Too many tell reporters and pollsters that their votes can be influenced by how the candidates came across in the debates. The president and vice president do not belong to debating societies. This isn’t Britain’s House of Commons. The ability to “win” a televised encounter has little or nothing to do with the job for which the men are contesting. Winners won’t debate until and unless they seek office again.

• News media would be in doldrums if there weren’t stories to write before and after each debate. They burn space and time when little else is happening - if you discount the economy, pestilence, war, famine, etc.

• Stories I didn’t read beyond the headlines. One’s from HuffingtonPost.com: "Lindsay Lohan Reveals Her Pick For President"The other is from the Thedailybeast.com:"LINDSAY LOHAN PICKS MITT! & OTHER TOXIC ENDORSEMENTS"

Media musings on Cincinnati and beyond

• I was in the Pacific Northwest and the three-hour time difference disrupted my already lousy sleep patterns. I dozed and listened to the BBC World Service on a local FM station when a familiar growl awakened me: WVXU’s Howard Wilkinson. You don’t work with a guy for a quarter century and not know his distinctive voice. BBC was in Cincinnati for an Obama visit and it wanted the best local politics reporter. Howard got up early. BBC got what it wanted. I eventually went back to sleep, lulled by BBC’s Humphrey Humphrey Humphreys reporting from some slum street in Dontunnastan.

• Enquirer Publisher Margaret Buchanan quit the UC board last week. It was a conflict of interests from the day she took her seat in 2006. She told the Enquirer, “My news team is reporting aggressively on the departure of UC President Greg Williams and the search for the next president. The credibility that is so important to our news team’s work is my highest priority, and I did not want my involvement with UC to make it uncomfortable or confusing for them or for the community.”

The conflict existed when she helped spend taxpayers’ and students’ money for six years or hired Greg Williams as president. Her Road to Damascus moment apparently came in the fallout from Williams’ surprise resignation without explanation and curious $1.3 million parting gift.

Now, to avoid another conflict of interest, she should resign from the executive committee of 3CDC where she has more than a passing interest in how her paper covers the private redeveloper of the city’s urban core.

These are the kinds of conflicts of interest that compromise the paper’s integrity and long have been unacceptable for reporters. Buchanan isn’t the first Enquirer publisher or editor to ignore a conflict of interest that raised questions about the integrity of related news stories. She probably won’t be the last. It would be ideal if everyone on the paper were bound by the same ethical standards.

• Enquirer use of Freedom of Information Acts continues to pay off. Friday’s Cliff Peale story about the surprise resignation of UC President Greg Williams draws on information obtained through FOIA. Granted, there is no smoking gun; whatever Williams’ reasons for quitting, he was smart enough to keep them out of memos and emails subject to FOIA. What Peale is learning from documents and interviews suggests an irreparable breach between UC’s board and president on how each should do its job.

• Sunday’s Enquirer devotes two pages in Local News to sell its various media services. Most Enquirer services look to newer ways it can provide news to readers (viewers?). Pay walls are there, too. Now, if the bean counters at Gannett would allow the Enquirer to open its archives to subscribers, the deal would be complete.

• Sunday’s Enquirer also exhibited a rediscovered spine with a major editorial opposing the streetcar project for Cincinnati. The reasoning, as far as it goes, is sound: there is no coherent plan to finance construction and operations and Cincinnati has more pressing infrastructure needs.

• For a related look into the Enquirer’s future, check the New York Times business page on Monday. It reports changes ordered by Enquirer owner Gannett at its Burlington, Vt., daily. They’re slightly ahead of our paper and reactions there are not as upbeat as those in memos to readers from the Enquirer’s editor and publisher.

• Fox News should not have apologized for broadcasting the suicide of a fleeing police suspect last week. Fox blamed inept use of its delay on live coverage. Lisa Wells, on WLW 700 Saturday, argued that Fox let it run for ratings; Fox knew what it was doing and there was no mistake. I can buy that. Ratings are why TV follows police chases live. In the video shot from a helicopter that followed the chase through traffic and on foot, the guy stops running, puts a handgun to his head and fires. His arm jerks and he slumps forward, away from the camera. So why apologize to a country where violent games and films are top earners and homicides generally are treated as a cost of urban living? If TV doesn’t expect something dramatic, why the live coverage from helicopters following fugitives and cop cars?

• Maybe vivid writing explains why Brits continue to buy daily papers. I culled this from the home page of London’s Telegraph: Chill wind blows for Mitt Romney in Ohio: As late September gales blew his dyed black fringe free from its gelled moorings, Romney's tanned face crumpled into a frown.

• A friend found this on NPR’s website. It promotes a broadcast by Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR’s Africa-based correspondent. In part, the promo said, “She also describes the stories that have been exciting, including the U.S. presidential race of the Kenyan-born Sen. Barack Obama.” The promo was dated Oct. 9, 2008. Does that make NPR the most authoritative news medium to buy the “Birther” conspiracy?

• It’s a dead horse, but I have to beat it. Why do local news media tie unrelated homicides to nearby institutions? Killings on Over-the-Rhine’s Green Street unfailingly are described as “near Findlay Market.” Last week, Local 12 repeatedly linked a Corryville street shooting to UC although no one except Local 12 made that connection. Why didn’t the TV folks link the shooting to the University Plaza Kroger store which probably was even closer, or to Walgreens and CVS?

• Winston Churchill is one of the people credited with this or a similar aphorism: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Today, he’d probably say, “A lie gets around the world in seconds after it’s posted on YouTube and it can’t be recalled.” So much for Madonna’s onstage lie that went viral after an audience member posted her line, “We have a black Muslim in the White House.” Now, she says she was being ironic. I don’t know what’s scarier, listening to Madonna ranting on politics or True Believers hearing her as affirmation of their deeply held fears about Obama.

• Recently, Fox and Friends showed Obama talking with an actor dressed as a pirate. Fox said “The White House doesn’t have the time to meet with the prime minister of Israel, but this pirate got a sit-down in the Oval Office yesterday.” Later, Fox used the image as its “Shot of the Morning,” according to the AP and jimromenesko.com. Fox host Steve Doocy said, “Here’a quick look at what President Obama is up to, making sure he didn’t forget to mark International Talk Like a Pirate Day.’

Uh, no. As the AP explained. The photo “was taken as a punchline for a joke Obama delivered to the White House Correspondents Association dinner in 2009 about the administration talking to enemies as well as friends.”

Fox & Friends admitted on a tweet that the photo was more than three years old but there was no evidence Fox told its cable audience about the partisan network fraud.

• National Review, a long respected conservative magazine, proved it’s no better than Fox. It Photoshopped the Oct. 1 (Monday) cover photo to underline the wider GOP accusation that pro-choice Democrats are the pro-abortion party of death. Reuters/Newscom disowned the image, saying its original photo “was altered by National Review” in print and digital editions. Charlotte Observer photographer Todd Sumlin, who provided his shot from the same angle, told jimromenesko.com, “I was on the photo platform directly behind the President at the Democratic National Convention . . . (P)osters the North Carolina delegates are holding were changed from ‘Forward’ to ‘Abortion’.”

• It’s not clear who promised what to whom but the family of murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens says CNN used his journal without permission. CNN found the journal in the ruined Benghazi consulate and relied on it for some reporting without saying it was Stevens’ private thoughts. My gut response: don’t promise anything and use it. His journal contained information relevant to the attack that killed him and three more Americans. The only reason I can see for State Department objections is that the journal might have been more revealing than officials wished.

• I’m grateful to Eric Alterman, The Nation’s media columnist, who reported that when “asked about the film that seemingly inspired the riots and attacks, (Romney) echoed exactly the same sentiments contained in the Cairo embassy statement that he and his putative champions had previously found so contemptible. ‘I think the whole film is a terrible idea. I think [that] making it, promoting it, showing it is disrespectful to people of other faiths . . . I think people should have the common courtesy and judgment — the good judgment — not to be, not to offend other peoples’ faiths’.”

As Alterman put it, “There you have it: Mitt Romney, terrorist apologist.” And if you think Alterman’s indulging in partisan hyperbole, here is the embassy statement issued before riots:

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

• Off-the-record always is tricky. Can you ever use what you learned? Can you use it if you disguise the source? Nothing is farther off the record than anything Britain’s reigning monarch says in private. Quoting her Just Isn’t Done. Now, Britain’s press is trying to assess the damage from the most tempest in a porcelain tea cup: a BBC reporter quoted Queen Elizabeth’s impatience with efforts to deport a radical imam to the United States to face terrorism charges. One does not say what, if anything, the Queen says to One. Talk about blowing access to a source. BBC and its reporter are new nominees for Golden Grovel Award.

• Then there is Andrew Mitchell, the sneering conservative parliamentary official who dismissed London bobbies as “fucking plebs.” He was outraged when they asked him to ride his bicycle through a side gate rather than the front gate at the prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street.

Damning police as his social inferiors is perfectly in tune with the traditional Conservative Party but it’s Bad Form for a guy whose governing party is trying to dump its elite and elitist history and image.

Mitchell’s fiercely upper class insult resonates through British society. The minister is posh — the right family, schools and universities, if not a Guards regiment. Constables are not.

“Fucking” isn’t the problem. “Pleb” is. The New York Times explained that Mitchell’s slur implies that the London Metropolitan Police — also known as Scotland Yard — are “worthless nobodies” in class-conscious Tory Britain.

It’s October. Tomorrow is the first day of in-person early
voting in Ohio. Find your nearest polling booth at the secretary of
state’s website here.

Michelle Obama will be in Cincinnati tomorrow to support
an in-person early voting push in Ohio. The state is considered vital
for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign against President Barack Obama, but while national polling is
close, Ohio is looking very bad for Romney. The
Romney team seems to be banking on the debates to regain momentum, but,
historically, debates have little electoral impact. The first debate is
Wednesday at 9 p.m. A
full schedule of the debates can be found here.

In more good news for Democrats, a recent poll by The Columbus Dispatch
found Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio is leading Josh Mandel,
state treasurer and Brown’s Republican opponent for the U.S. Senate seat, by 10 points. The last Dispatch
poll found the two candidates tied. The poll shows a long-term trend
seen in aggregate polling of Brown gaining momentum and Mandel falling
behind.

A former Republican Ohio state representative came out in support of
Issue 2. Joan Lawrence came out for the initiative as part of Women for Issue 2, claiming the current system is rigged. If Issue 2
is approved by voters this election cycle, Ohio’s redistricting will be
handled by an independent citizens committee. Currently, elected
officials manage Ohio’s redistricting process, but the process normally
leads to corruption in a process known
as “gerrymandering” in which politicians redraw district borders in
politically advantageous ways. In the First Congressional District,
which includes Cincinnati, district boundaries were redrawn by
Republicans to include less of Hamilton County’s urban population, which
tends to vote Democrat, and instead include the more rural Warren
County, which tends to vote Republican. CityBeat previously covered the issue and Republicans’ losses in court regarding Issue 2 here.

Margaret Buchanan, The Cincinnati Enquirer’s
publisher and president, left the University of Cincinnati Board of
Trustees Friday to avoid a potential conflict of interest in the
newspaper’s reporting on the UC Board of Trustees. CityBeat and
other media critics mentioned the conflict of interest in the past,
particularly when former UC President Greg Williams suddenly resigned
and Buchanan refused to comment on speculation around the resignation.

Cincinnati’s economic recovery is in full swing. For the
second straight month, the area’s manufacturers expanded. The Cincinnati
Purchasing Management Index, which measures manufacturing, went up from
54.6 in August to 58.8 in September. The index must be above 50 to
signify growth; below 50 shows contraction.

Cincinnati’s women-owned businesses are doing a lot more than some may think. They are responsible for 3,500 local area jobs.

Ohio’s attorney general is devoting more money toward
solving cold case homicides. Cold cases are old cases that have not been
the subject of recent investigations but could be solved in light of
new evidence.

Newspaper's president says she wants to avoid conflict of interest

Cincinnati Enquirer President and Publisher Margaret Buchanan is leaving the University of Cincinnati Board of Trustees, citing potential perception of a conflict of interest as her reporters cover the recent departure of UC's former president, Greg Williams, who abruptly resigned on Aug. 21.

“My news team is reporting aggressively on the departure
of UC President Greg Williams and the search for the next president,”
Buchanan said in a statement. “The credibility that is so important to
our news team’s work is my highest priority, and I did not want my
involvement with UC to make it uncomfortable or confusing for them or
for the community.”

When The Enquirer first reported Williams' resignation, the newspaper mentioned that Buchanan was on the UC board. However, The Enquirer did not mention asking Buchanan about the resignation even though she was present when it happened — an omission that raised questions for Jim Romenesko, a popular journalism blogger. In response,The Enquirer emailed Romenesko saying Buchanan did not know any extra information.

The Enquirer in at least six
follow-up stories about various individuals involved in the Williams resignation
neglected to mention Buchanan’s connection. The Enquirer again
noted Buchanan’s status on the board in an Aug. 24 story titled, “Williams, UC
board frustrated each other.” The story again failed to mention why
Buchanan wouldn’t comment.

For full disclosure, Buchanan today cited her board
positions at the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC),
Cincinnati Business Committee, UC Health, Marvin Lewis Foundation and
Neediest Kids of All.

CityBeat previously highlighted the potential conflict of interest between The Enquirerand other local organizations due to Buchanan's involvement. The Enquirer failed to cite connections between Buchanan and 3CDC multiple times in the past. A CityBeatanalysis found Buchanan was only mentioned in 15 out of 481 potential news articles about 3CDC. (Due to how The Enquirer’s database is organized, some of those news articles could be duplicates.) In one particular story, The Enquirer praised 3CDC while omitting the publisher’s ties to the nonprofit corporation.

Newspapers all around the state — including The Cincinnati Enquirer, which labelled its article an “Enquirer Exclusive” (both The Toledo Blade and Columbus Dispatch ran a story with the same angle as The Enquirer)
— are really excited about a new poll that found Sen. Sherrod Brown
leads Josh Mandel in the U.S. senatorial race for Ohio’s seat by 7
percent. But the poll only confirms what aggregate polling has been
saying for a while now.

Mayor Mark Mallory fired back at Commissioner Greg
Hartmann Friday. In a letter Tuesday, Hartmann accused Mallory of
failing to stick to his promises in support of a city-council committee that
would have established greater collaboration between Cincinnati and Hamilton
County governments. But in his letter, Mallory said the committee was
unnecessary and Hartmann was just playing politics by sending a letter
to media instead of calling the mayor on his cell phone.

Contrary to the claims of Mitt Romney’s campaign,
President Barack Obama does care about the work requirements in
welfare-to-work reform. In fact, Obama is disapproving of Ohio’s
program, which his administration says has not enforced work
requirements stringently enough. However, most of the blame is going to
former Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, not Gov. John Kasich, a
Republican.

Local homeless groups managed to get a hold of a $600,000
grant to aid homeless military veterans. The grant will provide
financial assistance and job training for the currently homeless and
vets at risk of becoming homeless.

City Council will host a special session today to get
public feedback and work on the new deal meant to prevent further
streetcar delays. The meeting will be at 10:30 a.m. at City Council
Chambers, City Hall room 300, 801 Plum St.

Citizens for Common Sense was formed to support Issue 4 on the November ballot, which changes City Council terms
from two to four years. The initiative would let political candidates
worry more about policy and less about campaigning, but some critics say
it would make it more difficult to hold council members accountable.

Media musings on Cincinnati and beyond

• Enquirer prices are going
up in a smart way. The paper is embracing a computerized system which
charges frequent users for its digital content. The more individuals
read, the more they’ll be charged. Full access will mean just that and
be available to home delivery and digital subscribers.

However, the Enquirer will
still limit unpaid access to its archives. That’s a cheapening
disservice to readers who want to know more than one day’s or one week’s
reporting.

Infrequent/occasional readers still will be able to read up to 20
articles a month online content without paying. With new ways to get the
news — smart phones, tablets, etc. — the Enquirer
is adapting. As publisher Margaret Buchanan said in a note to readers
and email, it’s better than following some other dailies by cutting
print editions to three-a-week and charging for digital.

For more than a decade, online versions of print content and unique
online content have been free but that’s not a sustainable business
policy. It’s also been trendy to ask why dailies gave away online what
they charged for in print. One response involved the technological
problems involved in charging for digital content. That apparently is
largely resolved here and elsewhere but it’s taken years. Another
response was that of papers including the New York Times:
free online content except for “premium” offerings such as op-ed
columnists. That failed. It irritated more people than it recruited.
Meanwhile, we became accustomed to the journalistic equivalent of a free
lunch.

I say “we” because I quit reading any number of favorite publications
when they threw up pay walls that did not include an occasional freebie.
At the head of the pack were the Wall Street Journal and British
dailies owned by Rupert Murdock. That included the London Times and Sunday Times.
The cost was too great for what I largely could find elsewhere. I still
turn to London’s Financial Times which allows me a few reads a
month. What publishers are learning to their glee is that readers are
willing to pay for much of that now that they can get it on mobile
devices. Surveys indicate that we have an insatiable appetite for news
so long as we can get it anytime, any place we want it. That’s good
news for all of us. Sustainable commercial news media remain vital to
our form of self-government if only because they are everywhere and no
other form of news media can do what they do.

• Maybe some of that new Enquirer
income (above) will allow editor Carolyn Washburn to restore some
traditional assignments that fell victim to years of staff purges. If
anyone needed further proof that firing or retiring specialty beat
reporters exacts a toll on credibility comes in a recent Enquirer
Healthy Living section. The paper turned the entire cover page over to
public relations people promoting their institutions in the guise of
news. At least the Enquirer
doesn’t pretend its reporters wrote those stories; UC Health and OSU got
the bylines. With newsroom staff reductions, it’s open season on
readers for public relations people. They increasingly operate without
the scrutiny and possible intervention of a savvy reporter.

• There is nothing wrong with what UC Health and OSU public relations people do when they offer free content to the Enquirer.
That’s their job; promote the best possible image for their
institutions consistent with the facts. The problem is at the paper.
This goes beyond the traditional back-scratching where reporters rewrite
news releases. That makes it the paper’s product and gives reporters a
chance to ask questions. A lot of what dailies — whether the Enquirer or Wall Street Journal — publish begins with press releases.

This symbiotic relationship can go too far. An Enquirer
journalist once took a junket, came home and put his byline on the
story prepared by the sponsor of the junket. When this
ethical/professional travesty was noted, there was, to the paper’s
shame, little or no condemnation. As one colleague put it, he thought it
was uncommonly well written.

Another time, an Enquirer
journalist put her name on a news release and ran it as a story, then
had the chutzpah to accept an award for that “reporting” from the group
that sent her the original press release.

• The planned Enquirer switch
to smaller, tabloid-like pages has been postponed until 2013; it was to
start this Fall. The paper blames problems with the new format and new
presses at the Columbus Dispatch which is to print both dailies. Meanwhile, Enquirer editor Carolyn Washburn continues to tell us that small is beautiful. Or will be.

• Channel 12 made the right decision in terms of audience numbers when
they switched from the men’s final in the U.S. Open to an hour of
Bengals chatter and then the game. However, viewers got an awful
football game and missed what proved to be a riveting tennis match.

• It’s never too early for Harvard undergrads to learn the importance
of fitting into the Establishment. Reporters of the daily Harvard Crimson, the cradle of untold New York Timesmen over the decades, have agreed to clear quotes with Harvard officials before publishing their stories.

Jimromenesko.com reported this ethical blindness, saying, “Sometimes
nothing is changed. But often, the quotations come back revised, to make
the wording more erudite, the phrasing more direct, or the message more
pointed. Sometimes the quotations are rejected outright or are
rewritten to mean just the opposite of what the administrator said in
the recorded interview.”

Romenesko also quoted Crimson
President (editor) Ben Samuels’ memo to his staff. It said, in part,
“(W)e’ve seen an increase over the past several years in sources,
especially Harvard administrators, who insist on reviewing their quotes
prior to publication. When those administrators read their quotes, even
quotes that Crimson reporters have recorded, they frequently ask that these quotes be modified. “

Some of Harvard’s highest officials — including the president of the
University, the provost, and the deans of the College and of the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences — have agreed to interviews with The Crimson
only on the condition that their quotes not be printed without their
approval. As a result, their quotes have become less candid, less
telling and less meaningful to our coverage . . . To increase our
striving for frank and informative quotations, we add a new policy now.
Effective immediately, no writer may agree to an interview on the terms
that quotes cannot be published without the source’s approval without
express permission of the Managing Editor or the (editor) President.”

• CNN International (CNNi) is too close to repressive governments with which it has business deals, London’s Guardian
says. “CNNi has aggressively pursued a business strategy of extensive,
multifaceted financial arrangements between the network and several of
the most repressive regimes around the world which the network purports
to cover,” the liberal British paper says. “These arrangements extend
far beyond standard sponsorship agreements for advertising of the type
most major media outlets feature. CNNi produces . . . programs in an
arrangement it describes as ‘in association with’ the government of a
country, and offers regimes the ability to pay for specific programs
about their country.” The Guardian
says these programs are then featured as part of CNNi's so-called "Eye
on" series ("Eye on Georgia", "Eye on the Philippines", "Eye on
Poland"), or "Marketplace Middle East", all of which is designed to tout
the positive economic, social and political features of that country.

The Guardian says “the
disclosure for such arrangements is often barely visible . . . To the
average viewer unaware of these government sponsorships, it appears to
be standard ‘reporting’ from the network.” The paper says that in some
“Eye on” programs, no such disclaimer is provided. CNN's "sponsorship
policy" says "'[P]arts of CNN's coverage beyond the daily news are
produced as special reports, which attract sponsors who pay to associate
their products or services with the editorial content,' but claims that
'at no stage do the sponsors have a say in which stories CNN
covers.'"

• Joe Biden’s acceptance speech at the Democrats’ convention reminded me
that “enormity” is a poor choice for something big enough to brag
about. If the speaker means huge, he/she should stick to that 5 cent
word and skip the 50 cent malaprop. Enormity describes something awful
or outrageous, not just big or important, as in, the enormity of a
famine or genocide. While they’re at it, speech writers should drop
“fraction” from texts they hand dimmer bosses and clients. A fraction
is anything less than the whole: 99/100 of something is a large
fraction. It’s not a synonym for small.

• Sometimes, NPR reporters have me talking back and it’s not because
it’s a “driveway moment,” when I won’t leave the car until the story is
over. It’s usually because they’ve blown a story, not matter how
balanced or detailed the broadcast. Repeated stories about the Chicago
public school teachers’ strike left me wondering: 26,000 teachers for
350,000 students. I know that’s not really 13+ students per teacher in
each classroom but the numbers still cry for explanation that in its he
said/she said reporting, NPR failed to provide.

• Here’s another approach to saving local journalism: invite the local
daily and public radio station to campus and integrate them with
journalism school. The New York Times
devoted a major business story to this innovation by Mercer University
in Macon, Ga. The story mentioned another innovation, this one in Ohio: TheNewsOutlet initiated by the daily Youngstown Vindicator
and Youngstown State University. Now, it includes Kent State and Akron
universities. Journalism students work as interns, providing news
stories to any organization. That made news when ProPublica, the
nonpartisan investigative website, joined forces with TheNewsOutlet.
Youngstown State journalism students initially will work on
investigative stories guided by ProPublica editors. ProPublica also is
an open source news organization.

• I’m willing to risk my perfect record at predicting Pulitzers: Tracey
Shelton’s stunning photo of four Syrian rebels silhouetted by the flash
of a tank shell that killed three of them in Aleppo. How Shelton
escaped is unclear. She is close enough for the men to be individually
recognizable. Her images are at GlobalPost.com: men sweeping a street,
grabbing their weapons at the sight of an advancing Syrian Army tank,
the explosion, the lone survivor running toward her through the smoke,
and his lucky minor arm wound. My previous prediction: that the Pulitzer
committee would change its rules to allow digital entries and honor the
New Orleans Times-Picayune for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina that inundated its presses.

• Poynter Online reports further proof of the nation’s partisan divide:
“In August, 31 percent of Democrats polled by the Pew Research Center
for People & the Press reported hearing ‘mostly bad news’ about the
economy. In September, only 15 percent characterized economic news as
bad. Sixty percent of Republicans and 36 percent of independents polled
said economic news was mostly bad. The poll’s authors found the gap
striking: Differences in perceptions of economic news emerged after
Barack Obama took office. But they never have been as great as they are
today.”

• I was delighted to read and hear reporters challenge Romney’s
falsification of the events in Cairo before the deadly riot in Benghazi.
Romney berated Cairo embassy staff for its attempt to defuse rising
Egyptian anger over the online short ridiculing and defaming Muhammed.
The embassy issued a statement sympathizing with Muslim anger over the
video. Romney damned the embassy staff and statement, saying it was the
worst kind of appeasement after rioting in Cairo and Benghazi. He had
to know the statement preceded either riot.

• American news media were of two minds when offered a graphic photo
of a shirtless Chris Stevens after the ambassador was killed in Libya.
Some media used it in their primary news reports. Others didn’t use it
on air or in print but offered it online to readers. I would have used
it. He was not bloody or disfigured, he was not being dragged through
the streets or otherwise abused. He was a murder victim, one of four
Americans killed in the consulate that day, and we can handle these
images and the clarity they bring to events. Our news media showed no
such squeamishness when provided photos of bloody Qaddafi.

• Being a Royal Grandmother probably has always been tough, but Queen
Elizabeth is having another annus terriblus: Prince Harry cavorts naked
with tarts in Las Vegas and the seemingly perfect Kate is photographed
topless on a vacation. Maybe the royals’ police protectors need remedial
ed: cell phone cameras are everywhere and nothing goes unnoticed,
especially if a royal prince is displaying his Crown Jewels, and
paparazzi were sured to track William and Kate and to take off her
bikini top on an outside balcony was unwittingly naive. Someone has to
explain the facts of public life to these folks. They can’t depend on
foreign news media being as deferential as those in the British Isles.
Harry’s immodesty was published in Britain largely because it was
universally available and seen online. Kate’s slip got plenty of online
attention, too. British papers, of course, had to write about the future
queen’s nipples without showing them. If there is an invasion of
privacy suit in France where the photos were published, the photos will
have to be introduced as evidence . . . and there we go again.

Williams out after three years, 'Enquirer' publisher/UC board member doesn't know why

University of Cincinnati President Greg
Williams stepped down yesterday. According to reports, Williams
walked into a UC Board of Trustees meeting, announced he was resigning effective
immediately and left.

Greg Hand, spokesperson for UC, said Williams resigned for “personal reasons.” No further explanation was provided by Williams.

Santa Ono, UC provost, is taking over temporarily as
interim president. In a tweet, he promised to give the university 150
percent.

Williams was at UC since 2009. A year after
arriving, he introduced his UC2019 plan. The plan seeks to make the
university into a top school by 2019. The plan also implied Williams had
long-term plans for UC, making his abrupt resignation even stranger.

The Board of Trustees seemed happy with Williams — at
least happy enough to give him a raise. On Sept. 20, 2011, the Board gave
Williams a $41,000 raise, bringing his salary up to $451,000. He also
got a $102,500 bonus.

The news took UC students by surprise. Lane Hart, student body president at UC, told the school's independent student newspaper, The News Record, he was “shocked” when he heard the news.

To give credit where credit is due, when The CincinnatiEnquirer first reported the story, the newspaper mentioned that Margaret Buchanan, president and publisher at TheEnquirer, is on the UC Board of Trustees. However, TheEnquirer
did not mention asking Buchanan about the resignation — an omission
that raised questions for Jim Romenesko, a popular journalism blogger.
Since then, TheEnquirer emailed Romenesko saying Buchanan did not know any extra information.